Tuesday, October 09, 2012

mildly relevant (and amusing): maths and poetry.

In your otherwise beautiful poem "The Vision of Sin" there is a verse which reads – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.

I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born."

The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

to be fair, it might still be true. i'm reading "every moment dies a man" to mean that for each moment, there is a man who dies, but there's no claim that exactly one man dies that moment.

however, it would be incorrect if there were moments when no man dies.

(at any rate, don't mind me: i didn't sleep well last night, was tired after a giving a seminar talk, and unwisely decided to tackle a lemma for a new problem to work on .. all of which have drained my energy and good sense for the evening.)

in case you were wondering ..

yes, the names of well-known people and theorems are obscured. as for why, too many irrelevant Google searches find their way here.
for example, search: "mαth jοbs wιkι" but without the funny greek symbols. as of a year or two ago, this blog came up in the first few hits.